Aaron Harris is the kind of person who gets consumed by a single subject and follows it down the rabbit hole. These days, the 37-year-old is obsessed with corn tortillas.
He essentially designed and graduated from his own corn tortilla culinary school. The curriculum included, among other things, two years of watching YouTube videos of Mexican abuelas (grandmothers) make tortillas in their kitchens.
That led him to start a business, Molino Tortilleria, selling corn tortillas, tortilla chips, fresh masa and ready-to-fry chips wholesale to restaurants, as well as to the general public at farmers markets in southwest Michigan and Chicago. The cottage business started in his casa in Stevensville, Michigan, with the grinder, known as a “molino” in Spanish, crammed into the laundry room with the washer and dryer.
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
After the sudden death of his older brother last summer, family became a higher priority for Harris. In August, he moved to Decatur with his wife and their 7-year-old son, Henry, to be near Harris’ older sister, Raquel, and his parents, all transplants from up North.
Now working out of a space in the Prep Kitchen campus in Doraville — and with the help of his retired father, Chester — the younger Harris hopes that his artisanal corn products will attract a local customer base as committed to supporting agricultural diversity (and, of course, a tasty corn tortilla) as he is.
Tortillas have been a staple throughout Harris’ life. He was raised on flour tortillas, the result of having a paternal grandmother from the northern Mexico state of Chihuahua, where wheat tortillas are a staple. Around 2018, his foodist fascinations, combined with his wife’s gluten intolerance, prompted him to go on a quest for a high-quality fresh corn tortilla. He wasn’t satisfied with what he found in the marketplace, so he began researching the ingredients and how to make his own.
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Rather than purchase commodity corn, Harris connected with heirloom and organic growers in the Midwest, as well as Mexico. For heirloom blue corn, he settled on a variety called blue clarage because it produces a softer product.
“It’s been grown for more than 100 years,” he said of the crop he obtains from an Ohio grower. He gets blue, white and yellow organic corn from Rovey Seed Co., out of Farmersville, Illinois. For red corn, he taps a Mexican company, Masienda, a source for many restaurants, he said.
He taught himself the art of nixtamalization, the process of cooking and steeping dried whole corn kernels in an alkaline solution of limewater. He learned how to grind the prepared kernels into masa, and the importance of hydration for this process.
“You can add moisture, but it’s hard to take hydration out,” he said. And he learned to massage the fresh masa like a baker handles bread dough.
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Harris fashions hand-rolled masa balls into impressive tortillas with a tortilla press. He also is adroit at using a tortilla machine with a hand crank, rollers and a cutter, to produce precise 5- and 6-inch corn tortillas.
When cooking and reheating corn tortillas, he been most successful having the comal, or griddle, at medium-high heat, sprinkling water on each side of the tortilla (he uses a spray bottle), then warming the tortilla for 10-20 seconds per side, flipping until it’s soft.
“It’s been a lot of trial and error, he said.
Once Harris cracked the code, it was corn tortilla nirvana. “Having the first bite is a revelation. It shatters your idea of what a good tortilla should be,” he said.
Molino Tortilleria debuted in 2019 at a farmers market in St. Joseph, Michigan. “The first day, we brought 25 packages and sold out in 7 minutes,” said Harris, who wasn’t sure how many folks would be willing to pay between $5 and $6 for a dozen heirloom yellow and blue corn tortillas made from scratch.
Through farmers markets, Harris met Chicago area chefs and developed accounts with restaurants, including a couple owned by Rick Bayless, as well as acclaimed chef Diana Davila’s Mi Tocaya.
It turns out that “Chicago is a big tortilla town,” Harris said.
After we played around in the Prep kitchen with the grinder, tortilla press and hand-crank model that Harris has been using since the early days to make tortillas one by one, he introduced me to “Tía,” the newest member of the family.
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Tía is an automated tortilla machine that arrived in April. It cost Harris $85,000 when he bought it from a San Francisco manufacturer two years ago, but he had to delay shipping, because he didn’t have the kitchen capacity. He expects Tía to be a game-changer, turning fresh masa into perfect, thin rounds before sending them on a journey through the winding tiers of the conveyor belt at exactly 530 degrees. “It does in 1 hour what it takes one person to do in 8 hours,” he said.
When asked why the machine was nicknamed Tía, which means “aunt” in Spanish, Chester Harris quickly quipped that aunts are easy to work with — mothers and wives, not so much.
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
As the Harris father and son team — and sometimes sister Raquel — ramp up production, they also are peddling their product to local restaurants and retailers. They’ve signed on Mexican restaurant El Tesoro in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood and Botica in Buckhead. Their goods also are stocked at Alon’s Bakery and the Grant Park Market.
Business is looking up, but Harris can’t quit his full-time job at a local marketing firm just yet. Still, he remains passionate. “I have to believe in something to get up and do it every day,” he said. “Four years later, and all the stuff we’ve been through, it still excites me.”
Molino Tortilleria. 630-291-3689, molinotortillas.com
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